


your bones are held together by your nightmares and your frights

by thanksforthecrumb



Category: The 100 (TV)
Genre: Aftermath of Torture, Hurt/Comfort, M/M, Nightmares, Physical/Emotional Trauma, Scars, Torture, also im not quite sure if its graphic violence but there are torture scenes so, can be read as platonic hence the ampersand
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-02-18
Updated: 2016-02-18
Packaged: 2018-05-21 03:48:19
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,166
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6036814
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thanksforthecrumb/pseuds/thanksforthecrumb
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Murphy has nightmares and scars and only Bellamy to comfort him. It's not enough, and nothing's okay, but maybe it could be. (for a prompt on tumblr. 4+1 things.)</p>
            </blockquote>





	your bones are held together by your nightmares and your frights

**Author's Note:**

> this has been 89% finished for months. yikes. im really sorry @ prompter. never meant to take this long. also, i made it a 4+1 instead of 5+1 to get it posted quicker. i won’t list the prompt here bc it’s long, but you can see it [here](http://murphamyfanfiction.tumblr.com/post/139566284803/prompt-prompt-murphamy-5-1-murphy-has) on tumblr.
> 
> some pieces of the fic are (intentionally) hard to follow, due to the nature of this prompt/the state of murphy. just try to roll with it; murphy doesn't understand what's going on either. title from twenty one pilots' "the pantaloon."
> 
> tw: torture, graphic (?) violence, physical/mental/emotional trauma

_i._

Murphy can’t tell if it’s his shivers that rip him from sleep or if it’s his screams. He lies in his tent, huddled against the ground, too cold to sit up, too scared to open his eyes and find himself back in the Grounder camp, tied to a tree with rough ropes that cut into his wrists. He shivers again and can’t even bring himself to rub at his arms, knowing the slits and slices and missing pieces that he’d thought had healed over will be hot and pulsing, oozing blood.

_Every minute you spend not talking earns you one of these._ The knife comes down near the tip of his nose, comes to a teasing rest at its bridge. Murphy whines, trying to shuffle away while his hands are bound. He shakes his head at the Grounder, her teeth glinting vicious white in the darkness. She brings her knife away and twirls it in her hand, each turn mimicking the spinning in Murphy’s stomach. He swallows. 

“Don’t, please. Don’t. _Don’t._ I can’t—I don’t know anything, I swear. I’m nothing. I don’t know anything, I don’t _mean_ anyth—”He bites his tongue as the knife buries itself in the tree he’s tied to, a fingernail’s width away from his jaw. She makes a growling noise—it’s impossible to tell whether she’s speaking her language or simply grunting a warning. Either way, Murphy shudders in his bonds, feeling the phantom knife pierce his skin over and over, sharp, fiery pain exploding across his face as he imagines his cheek slashed open, thick copper liquid soaking into his lips, lungs choking on his own blood as it crawls down his throat. 

He cries, as quietly as he can, because even though they’re counting on his weakness, the Grounders hate it more than anything. The tears trickle down his face, burning rivers that stab his ripped lips and the scratches on his cheeks. It resembles too closely the hot flow of blood he’d imagined just a moment ago, and he struggles feebly against his ties, wishing he could rub the tears away.

A shadowy group of Grounders circles around him, and his head lolls as he looks at them, taking in each weapon. Two swords. Three spears. A rock. Five knives. He shakes his head again, over and over, and a few of his teeth rattle inside his mouth.

“Please,” is all he gets out before he sees the flash of metal.

“Murphy. Hey. Murphy.” Rough hands grab his shoulders, and he flinches as they scrape his cuts, salty skin tearing at the opened tissue. “Murphy, look at me. You’re okay.”

His lip trembles as his eyes open, still half-ready to see the Grounders with their clubs and spears and swords hanging by their sides, all dripping with his blood. He sees Bellamy instead. Wide brown eyes, face streaked with dirt, curls spilling over his forehead and ears. Murphy shudders in his grip, and Bellamy relaxes.

“You’re okay,” he keeps repeating, the words sounding blurry, “you’re okay, you’re safe, you’re okay.”

The Grounder camp and its foul smell of iron fades, replaced by the smell of sweat, pine sap, dirt. What had started out as a grudging sharing of tents had turned into whispered words in the dark, and most nights Bellamy sleeps curled around Murphy’s body in a vain attempt to protect him from nightmares.

But Murphy learned long ago: Fear defeats love every time.

It’s why Bellamy can’t look directly at Murphy, why his hands brush against Murphy’s shoulders obsessively, why he sounds like he’s trying to convince himself when he says, “You’re gonna be fine.”

They both know it’s a lie, can be nothing else. Because Murphy screams while he’s awake and while he’s sleeping, because nightmares happen in the day too, because open eyes don’t mean reality.

 

_ii._

It’s impossible to tell how long he’s been in the Grounder camp. He lives from pain to pain, allowed to pass out from the bleeding and bruising every once in a while, only to be woken by a kick to the stomach and the promise of a blade in his flesh. It feels like it’s been decades; Murphy’s certainly gotten enough scars to last a lifetime.

He’d swung back the first few times. He’d hurled a few taunts, not even sure the Grounders understood them. He’d tried—at least until _try_ started sounding more like the hiss of metal, the crack of bones, rip of skin. And through it all, what hurts almost as much as the cuts on his body is the fact that they broke him. Quickly and in ragged pieces, they’d torn him apart, and the bits of him that can still feel something other than pain knows that he _let_ them.

He sees a Grounder coming closer out of the corner of his eye and forces his body to go limp. They won’t care if he’s sleeping; they’ll just punch him awake, but maybe he’ll get a few more moments without a knife in his belly.

“On the ground,” someone orders. “You’re not fooling anyone.”

Murphy stiffens, and then a pair of rough hands grind his shoulders into the dirt. They stay there, apparently not satisfied.

“Lift your shirt.”

His heart drops. His shirt, in scraps at this point, is all but glued to his stomach, blood, fluids, and mud cementing it to his skin.

“Lift your _shirt_ ,” the Grounder says again, shoving him deeper into the ground.

He pants, tugging at the hem of the cloth with his bound hands. It makes a sucking noise, and he bites his lip as open air hits the slits they’d made. “Fuck,” he says, “fuck, please.”

And it’s odd, really. He’s never been one for manners, but bring out a knife and he’s all _please_ this and _please_ that. He would laugh, he thinks, if he wasn’t so occupied with keeping the screams down his throat.

“Tell me,” the Grounder says. Sharp pressure up near his ribs. His hands don’t shake, not even the tiniest bit. He holds the knife to Murphy’s skin with unwavering strength.

“I don’t know,” Murphy wheezes back. “I can’t tell you.”

A tendril of pain flares high on his chest, poking its way into his head until it’s all there is, pounding pounding pounding, explosions of searing agony shredding his mind.

“ _Stop!_ ” he shrieks, and maybe somewhere he knows it won’t help anything, will only make the knife press deeper, but it slips out with all the other useless words. “Stop, please, stop. I don’t _know_ anything, I don’t kn—”

“Murphy.”

His face is hot, sticky with drying tears. It takes his eyes a minute to adjust, but by then his heart has slowed considerably.

“Murphy, I’ve got you. It’s okay. You’re okay. I’ve got you.”

The blood on his chest turns into sweat, the Grounder ropes turn into Bellamy’s arms, the knife a block of wood Murphy’s been whittling, inexplicably enclosed in his hands and pressed against his stomach.

“Sorry,” Murphy says dully.

“Don’t.”

Murphy shakes his head, and Bellamy lets go.

The first time he’d screamed, the first time he’d woken Bellamy up, the older boy had taken one look at him, shivering and blubbering and fanatically checking his scars, and given Murphy his blanket. He hadn’t asked for an explanation, hadn’t asked if everything was okay, and Murphy hadn’t said thank you. The words would’ve been unnecessary.

The second time, Bellamy had pretended to sleep through it. But as Murphy was berating himself back into sleep, he saw the flicker of an open eye, suspiciously trained on the roof of the tent. He didn’t sleep any easier that night, but when he woke up in the morning Bellamy was waiting, one eye opened and darting away from Murphy not quite fast enough.

On the third night, Bellamy slid under Murphy’s covers, putting a firm arm around his shaking. “Just this once,” he’d rasped. “Just this once.”

(It was just another of Bellamy’s broken promises, but this one didn’t hurt as much.)

 

_iii._

She comes in the dark—morning or night, Murphy can’t tell. But it’s cold, he’s always cold now, and the air has a new feel to it. The torch she carries burns against his eyes, and he wonders dimly if she’s come to light him a fire.

(The awful thing about hope is that it never goes away, no matter how broken you are.)

He tries to stifle his shivering, knowing that his weakness will not be rewarded. She cocks her head at him. “You look a bit chilly,” she says.

Before, he might’ve spat at her. Cursed her out, snarled. Now he only bows his head.

She squats beside him, waving the torch. “This should help,” she says, and his eyes go wide as she hands it to him, and his body goes rigid in anticipation of the much welcome warmth, and his brain barely has enough time to send warning signals racing through his body as she lowers the fire onto his arm.

It’s sickening. His stomach twists. The hair on his body is stiff if it hasn’t been burned off. His nose is filled with the nauseating smell of his own blistering skin. His entire mind feels like it’s been set ablaze. Heat beyond red; pain beyond bubbling flesh, beyond anything he’s ever known.

He screams. At least, he thinks he does. All he sees, hears, tastes: ripples of burning, tearing pain. He thinks his vision melts, a slow-spreading black ink covering his eyes, and acrid smoke scrapes his throat as the flames lap at his arm, tugging him somewhere dark and raging with blind fire.

Someone shakes him. The choking dry heat on Murphy’s body disappears, replaced by two clammy hands on his shoulders. He blinks his eyes open.

“Fuck,” Bellamy swears, sounding more relieved than anything. He lets go. “You were twitching. Really bad. And then you—uh. You started screaming.”

Murphy rubs at his arms, the places where Bellamy’d held him sticky with cold sweat. “Sorry. I-I’m trying to stop it.”

“ _Fuck_ ,” Bellamy says again, angry this time. Murphy doesn’t wonder at what—his head is still heavy with fear. Bellamy looks at him, hard brown eyes softening as they travel up the younger boy’s trembling body. “Hey. Don’t worry. You’re okay now. You’re fine now.”

The kid who’d followed around his leader like a lost puppy would’ve believed him, Murphy thinks. The kid who killed when he was told to kill, who hated when he was told to hate, who loved when he wasn’t given a reason, would’ve trusted anything out of Bellamy’s mouth. But bandages can’t heal stretched necks or internal damage, and time is a shit-slow nurse when it comes down to it. 

The kid who has never been given a place to stand wants to trust again (wishes he can), but he knows it’ll end with blood. And his heart’s an open wound as it is.

Bellamy guides Murphy’s hand away from his arms, where he’d been subconsciously touching knife scars. Murphy shivers at the touch. He flinches away. “Why do you do that?” he asks, absent and flat.

Bellamy looks at him. “Do what?”

“Help me.”

“Because you need it.”

“Doesn’t mean I deserve it.”

“Maybe not,” Bellamy says. “But it’s what we do.”

Murphy laughs. “Yeah, way back to when we hanged each other. How _helpful_.”

Bellamy doesn’t say anything, but Murphy can hear the rustling of the blankets as he fixes up the tent. Murphy crosses his arms and retreats to the corner of the space.

“Why do you do that?” Bellamy echoes, pausing.

Murphy stares.

“Pull away when someone tries to help. Tries to make it better.”

“I was in your way,” Murphy mutters. “I’m always in the way.”

“No you’re not.” Bellamy inches closer, and Murphy looks at the ground. “You’re not.” 

His breath is heavy and warm, and it tugs at the back of Murphy’s neck. It should be comforting. It should feel good to know that someone is watching over you, needing you to be safe. Murphy’s throat tightens in anger instead. Irrational anger, fear’s anger—the only kinds of anger he’s ever known.

“You can’t work fucking _miracles_ , Bellamy!” he yells. “You can’t save anyone, and you can’t save me. So just—just stop fucking _trying_.”

_That’s what I did,_ he wants to add.

If Murphy knows anything, it’s about the worst kind of pain. Broken trust, dead love. All the too good to be true things that you find yourself believing in, the things that leave you bleeding in the dirt, the only way you knew it was going to end. There’s no bigger bitch than hope and love, and for a murderous orphan outcast Murphy’s known a hell of a lot of both.

“I gave up on you before,” Bellamy says slowly. “I won’t do it again.”

And even though he knows he shouldn’t believe him, even though he knows it’ll end like everything always does, Murphy can feel himself trusting the older boy. Weak of body, weak of heart, he thinks.

“Come back to bed,” Bellamy says. “You’re probably freezing by now.”

Murphy looks away, but Bellamy’s right. He’s shaking with cold and residual fear, and so he crawls back under the blankets, back to the other boy.

Murphy lets Bellamy wrap him close in his arms, because he knows Bellamy hates to see him in pain like this (if only for the moment), and he might as well let someone sleep easy at night.

 

_iv._

They rip his fingernails off, one by one, right hand first, and in carefully calculated sets so that the pain doesn’t let him black out. He begs the quietest then, _please_ and _stop_ and _don’t_ tangling in an ugly red mess, trapped behind the wall of blood in his mouth because he’s too scared they’ll kick him again if he tries to spit it out.

The big Grounder takes his hand, and Murphy winces automatically, waiting for a rock or club to smash the delicate bones. Nothing comes. He opens an eye. The Grounder flashes him a dark smile and makes Murphy wave at himself.

“Choose _,_ ” he says, waiting for Murphy’s answer.

“I-I don’t—” Murphy coughs. Something frothing and hot dribbles over his lips, and he nearly pukes at the heavy metallic taste.

The Grounder stares impassively back. “ _Choose_ ,” he grunts again, shaking Murphy’s hand.

Murphy feels his eyes prick. “Please don’t cut it off,” he whispers. His words make a whistling noise as they scrape through his blood-coated throat. “Please.”

The Grounder only smiles again, a vicious thing, curved like a slice on his face. He calls to the others, and two figures appear in front of Murphy’s dimming eyes.

“ _Please_.”

They discuss in their language, quick and low, and Murphy only catches “ _honoun_.” It’s one of the few words he knows, after hearing them call him by it so many times. It didn’t take long to work out, really. Prisoner. That, and _kot op_ , which was easy to figure out since it’s always followed up by knives and swords and Murphy’s blood.

“ _Hod em_ ,” the first Grounder says. Murphy fights against the two pairs of arms feebly; his body is sore and weak from blood loss. And it’s not like he’d have stood a chance anyway.

“You’re going to tell me,” the Grounder says, taking off his skeletal gloves, “where your friends are, or life’s about to get very painful, very fast.”

“I-I don’t have any friends.”

“Lying is worse than not saying anything.”

“It’s the fucking truth.” Murphy wants to spit on him, but he’s not confident that there’s anything besides bile and blood in his mouth, and he figures the more blood he keeps in his body the better.

The Grounder regards him. “We’re going to find your friends whether you tell us or not. You could avoid this, save yourself some pain. Where are they?”

“No,” Murphy says, “no, I won’t. I can’t.”

Huge calloused hands wrap around Murphy’s wrists. He shakes his head, and soon the rest of his body follows suit. “I can’t tell you,” he says, and he knows he’s saying it more to himself than to the Grounder. For all that they did to him, for all that they hated him and blamed him, he thinks he can’t let himself give them up. Not like they’d given him up.

He was never the hero, he knows, but he’s never stopped wanting to be one.

“You brought this on yourself,” the Grounder says grimly. Murphy doesn’t even have time to realize what he’s doing before he feels a horrible pressure on the seam of his fingernail.

He screams, wordless, as the nail is torn from his fingers. His vision stops, replaced by a wall of shrieking red. The outside air hits his unprotected nail bed, cutting into the flesh so that it seems like his heart travels from his chest to the tips of his fingers, aching all the way. And he cries the entire time, a normal thing now, although it’s amazing that he has anything left in his body other than the blood that flows so darkly out of his stomach, his hands, his arms.

“Tell me where your base is,” the Grounder snarls, flicking the bloody nail at Murphy’s face, “or I’ll do this again until your fingers are bare.”

“St-stop.”

“One last chance.” His calloused fingers hover over Murphy’s raw skin, every part of his body trembling at the waiting touch.

“I can’t,” he tears out. “I can’t.”

The Grounder’s dirt-darkened face settles deeper into a grimace. He latches onto another nail immediately, and Murphy’s head starts going crazy, heart stuttering.

“I can’t tell you,” he sobs. “I’m sorry, I can’t–please don’t—”

The nail comes off with a sickening rip. It reaches Murphy’s ears belatedly, and he’s almost glad that he isn’t able to line the sound of the tear up with the flash of white, the scream of agony at the seams of his fingers, bleeding into every last piece of Murphy’s body.

“Again,” the Grounder says.

Murphy moans, not even able to shape his lips around the words. They pull another nail from its roots, and when Murphy’s shrieks subside he starts to retch, hot, stinking acid stinging its way past his lips.

He passes out around the fourth nail. They slap him awake.

When they reach the thumb of his left hand—the last one; they’d saved the worst for last—he breaks, body too weighed down with pain and fear to bear any more.

“Stop,” he groans as the Grounder’s hands settle on the nail, “I’ll t-tell you. Just…please.”

His head is so swathed in aches that he can barely feel shame as he tells the Grounders about the delinquents, using words that won’t mean anything to the Grounders, names that they don’t recognize. He sags when he’s finished, relieved that he’s bought himself an absence of pain, horrified at the cost.

And when he quiets, they wrench his thumb’s nail from the finger. “That’s for taking so long to cooperate,” the Grounder hisses. But Murphy can’t hear. Can’t see, can’t breathe, can’t even hope anymore.

He broke, and they hurt him anyway.

He gasps, tears stabbing his eyes. “You said–you _p_ - _promised_ —”

The Grounder regards him, wiping his hands against his jacket of stretched leather. “Traitors don’t get mercy,” he retorts. He stands, and the others release Murphy’s arms and follow.

They leave him bleeding in the dirt, like so many others before. Murphy’s hands throb and ache and any tiny movement he makes—the shuddering of his chest, the twitching of his legs—stirs them to blinding pain. He tries to stop shaking, but he only seems to shake harder.

“Murphy,” someone says, unseen. “Murphy.”

In his torture-clouded brain, he can’t even distinguish the voice, but he knows he recognizes it. Gruff and low, not unlike a Grounder’s, but gentler, too. He thinks he trusted that voice once, a long time ago. But he does not trust anyone now, and he shrinks from it.

“ _Murphy_ ,” they insist. “I’ve got you. Look at me. Look at me, Murph.”

No Grounder would call him Murph, that much he knows. Only one person called him that.

He opens his eyes. Bellamy’s hands are at his shoulders, shaking him awake.

“Fuck!” Murphy yelps, pain still fresh in his mind, at his fingertips. “Get off me.”

Bellamy pulls back immediately. “Sorry,” he mutters. “I tried to wake you up before it got bad, but…” He looks pointedly at Murphy, trembling, with his knees to his chest, hands splayed carefully before him so as not to be touched by anything but the air.

Murphy shakes his head. He doesn’t say, _It’s fine_. They both know it’s not. And anyway. That’s Bellamy’s job.

Sure enough, he takes a deep breath and seems to consider moving closer to Murphy. It takes too long for him to decide, though Murphy doesn’t notice, too engrossed in his relapsed nightmare, but Bellamy does, and the seconds seem painful.

“Murphy,” he says quietly, trying not to spook him. “You’re gonna be okay.”

There’s another sharp minute of silence before Murphy snaps his head up, eyes less cloudy. “How the fuck can you _say_ that? How can you say that when—” He stops. Bellamy’s stomach twists.

“I’m so scared.”

The words drift into the air, wisps of words that can’t ever explain the terror in Murphy’s eyes, the quivering in his body. The vowels are broken, the consonants hollow. They are empty words from a boy too tired and cracked to fill them. Tonight he is soft, sad, young, tired. He is not angry or loud, vicious or impatient as he usually is.

Bellamy’s stomach gives another twinge. He knows what this is—a giving up, a giving in, and it scares him to hear it from Murphy, who would’ve fought a lion if one had stepped in his path.

“Don’t be,” is all he can say, and even he knows it’s inadequate. “Don’t be scared. You’re going to make it out of this.”

Murphy only looks at his hands.

“I’m going to _help_ you out of this,” Bellamy adds, studying Murphy for any change. There’s nothing, only dead eyes staring at dead nails. Bellamy sits, quiet, hoping Murphy will stir. He’s not used to seeing the younger boy stay still for so long.

“It hurt so much, Bell,” he whispers finally, hoarse. The nickname comes as a surprise to Bellamy, and it would’ve shocked Murphy, too, if he hadn’t been lost in his nightmares.

“They promised they’d stop if I told them…I tried not to; I really tried, but—”

Bellamy shifts, uncomfortable. “I know. I know you tried. “

Murphy doesn’t seem to hear him. Bellamy wonders what he would say if he had, or if the words were so meaningless they didn’t warrant a response at all. _Actions speak louder than words_ , his mother used to say. And looking at the scarred, fear-stiffened body of a boy who was never built to bear so much pain, Bellamy has to agree.

It’s with hesitation that he wraps his arms around Murphy’s shoulders, and it’s with hesitation that Murphy lets him. He tenses as soon as they make contact, but Bellamy feels him relax (reluctantly) after a minute. The smaller kid’s arms don’t come around Bellamy’s back, but he does lean into the embrace. His breath puffs against Bellamy’s neck, and Bellamy feels a dribble of something wet hit his skin.

“They didn’t stop,” Murphy says, muffled against the hug. His voice has that sticky, thick quality that enters the throat whenever someone’s been crying. “They promised they–they promised they’d stop.” He draws an aching breath. “They lied, they lied.”

Bellamy’s heart plummets to his toes, and he wonders if Murphy can even hear the parallels in what he’s saying. In promises broken, in trust torn to shreds; red shreds, like the fraying ends of a belt meant to save a life. 

He closes his eyes against it, but the pressure at his neck (a reminder, always a reminder, of what he’s done and what’s been done to him) doesn’t recede. “I’m sorry,” he breathes, the words floating over Murphy’s back and curling into the cold air.

Murphy shivers again, and the strangled cough-sob that shatters past his lips is an apology, too. The words come easy to him now, because he’s been living an apology since his father died. I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry. And he means it every time.

Bellamy doesn’t move out from underneath Murphy, but he does rest a tentative hand on his back. “You’re going to be okay,” he says. “I promise.”

But Murphy flinches in his arms at that, and Bellamy swears at his thoughtless words. He’d meant them, of course he had, but then, no one ever _means_ to break a promise, do they?

Love is flimsy—dead in the snap of a neck, in the instant the wrong words are spoken, in the one mistake that changes everything; the one mistake you know you’ll never repeat.

“Bellamy,” Murphy says after a long stretch of silence, and Bellamy realizes then that he isn’t that much older than Octavia, "why do they always lie?”

He doesn’t ask who _they_ is, but he thinks he has a pretty good idea. It's a long list, and he's on it. He says nothing, just presses Murphy closer. Actions speak louder than words, he thinks, and besides. He won’t lie to Murphy again.

 

_v._

“Jump,” the Grounder says, teeth a white smudge amongst dirt and skin and paint. The horse she sits paws restlessly at the ground, too close to Murphy’s feet. She reins her beast in. “Jump,” she says again, pointing to the ravine.

Murphy stumbles back. “No,” he croaks out, bringing his tied hands to his chest.

She laughs, more like a snarl. “Jump.”

“You won’t m-make me,” he says. “You can’t. You need me.” He chokes on the words, heart in his throat as he eyes the chasm. “You need me.”

The Grounder bares her teeth in a smile, growling now, and when she speaks her words are serpentine; lightning-fast and laced with poison. “No one needs you.” She grabs the ragged cloth over Murphy’s chest, cuts the bonds between his hands, and shoves him off the ledge. Murphy screams as he falls, wind lashing the open sores on his body.

It’s amazing, really—for all the air hissing past his face, there seems to be none in his lungs. He gasps for it, clenching his fists. In the end it shouldn’t matter; he’s going to die anyway, once he reaches the bottom of the ravine. He fights for a breath, but the utter nothing beneath his back, the fear in his falling body (always fear, always fear) wins, and the last thing he sees before his eyes black out is the slightly warmer dark of the night.

Murphy’s eyes snap open.

He regrets it almost immediately, too-bright light ramming into his face. His body is disoriented—it takes a wild moment of checking his arms and legs, patting his chest, before he’s convinced. A dream. It had been a dream. He breathes in greedily now, the memory of his fall still running strong through his blood.

Bellamy eyes him from the edge of the tent. Murphy feels a flash of guilt for waking him up again, but Bellamy doesn’t look annoyed. He looks concerned. He sidles closer, picking at a fingernail. Murphy winces inadvertently, his own crooked nails throbbing.

“You had another nightmare,” Bellamy says.

Murphy almost laughs. He can’t remember a night when he didn’t have them. But all he says is, “Yeah.”

“I thought they’d gotten better.”

“Hard to tell,” Murphy says. He reaches for his knife and the wood. “There’s not really a concept of ‘better’ when you’re getting maimed.”

Bellamy rubs at his arm. “How bad?”

“Pushed me off a cliff.”

He looks away. “I’m sorry.”

Murphy shrugs. It’s not the fall that sticks with him, not nearly as much as the Grounder’s words.

_No one needs you._

Whoever came up with that old Earth rhyme, that cruel little verse about sticks and stones and broken bones—well, they were a fucking idiot. Murphy puts his head down over his knife, notching crude patterns into his piece of scarred wood.

“It’s my fault,” Bellamy says after a while.

“Yeah, well. It doesn’t matter anymore.”

“It mattered then.”

The knife drives itself toward the block, misses, skitters out of Murphy’s hands. He picks it up, palms slick with sweat. “Forgive and forget. We were both dicks. We did shitty stuff.”

Bellamy watches him; Murphy pretends he doesn’t. “What are you doing?” he asks. “You’re always fiddling with that scrap of wood.”

Murphy grunts, cutting a mostly straight line through a knobby circle.

“You never struck me as an arts and crafts kind of kid.”

“You never knew me as a kid.”

Bellamy smirks. “I think I can imagine.”

Murphy scowls at the blade. “Sometimes I pretend I’m cutting the Grounders who cut me. Sometimes I just like the patterns.”

The smirk falls off Bellamy’s face, and Murphy feels his eyes dart to the wood piece. “Yeah,” is all he says. “I get it.”

They sit in silence, the occasional scraping of wood against metal breaking the quiet. Murphy waits for Bellamy to tell him to get up, that it’s time to get started, that there are things to do around camp. It doesn’t come. Bellamy watches each ragged nick appear on the wood, hardly breathing.

He opens his mouth to speak, and, even though it shouldn’t, what he says shocks the wood out of Murphy’s hand. “You okay?” he asks. It comes as a question for the first time, like Bellamy’s finally confident that Murphy can answer for himself.

Murphy studies him. His mouth has a new curve to it, his hair particularly unruly, his eyes soft and warm. Murphy finishes the sequence of notches he’s working on before nodding. Maybe it’s a lie, but it’s a small one. Getting smaller.

Bellamy’s calloused palm covers his hand. “Can I try?” he asks.

“We all know you’re a better whittler, Blake,” Murphy grumbles. “You don’t have anything to prove.” But he gives the scrap of wood over without a second thought, and he thinks maybe the brush of hand against hand can’t be a complete accident.

* * *

Everything is quiet when they crawl back into their tent for the night, and Murphy feels guilty that he’ll shatter the silence in a few hours.

“Tighter,” he says to Bellamy, and if he’s worried the words get lost under the blankets, he shouldn’t be, because Bellamy tucks him closer to his chest, so close that he can feel the heat and hear the thump of his heart, and the dull pounding drowns out his throbbing scars and sings him to sleep.

**Author's Note:**

> hmu on tumblr [here](http://www.murphamyfanfiction.tumblr.com) (murphamy fanfiction blog) or [here](http://www.booksnobmurphy.tumblr.com) (personal/fandom). feel free to drop a prompt @ mff, but chances are it’ll take a while to write. im shockingly busy.
> 
> translations:  
> honoun — prisoner  
> kot op — cut  
> hod em — hold him


End file.
